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Red vs. Blue, Rich vs. Poor

Bad headline to an interesting column: On Wednesday E.J. Dionne published a column in the Washington Post entitled “What Kind of Hater Are You?” and the rather awful title covers a discussion about how the dynamics in political competition differ between states in the U.S.To make a long story short: The statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman wanted to address this interesting riddle: On the one hand rich people tend to support the Republicans and poor people the Democrats. On the other hand Democrats enjoy more support in rich states and Republicans in poor states.That’s a classical two-level problem which Gelman solves by applying the relevant statistical analysis and he presents his results in a very elegant presentation: Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State (pdf-document, opens in a new window). You can also download the analysis as a paper (pdf-document, opens in a new window).